Month: April 2018

The past 2 weeks were very intense and we’re very happy to release a new version of the WP-GDPR Core plugin and all add-ons we created. We’re also releasing a new add-on and announce the upcoming mailchimp add-on.

WP-GDPR Core 1.5.3 release

We released version 1.5.3 of WP-GDPR Core. This release contains:

Logging for debug purpose

Privacy policy per add-on

Bulgarian translation

Create specific email for DPO contact

Prepare for Flamingo add-on

Prepare for Mailchimp add-on

If an error occurs in the WP-GDPR Core or there is a conflict with another plugin or theme, it’s very hard to do proper debugging. We provide you with a logging feature you can enable when you think something goes wrong and wrote a tutorial to explain more on this topic.

New add-on: Flamingo

Users of the Contact Form 7 plugin are probably also familiar with Flamingo. It’s created by Takayuki Miyoshi, who also created Contact Form 7 and is the recommended plugin to store messages from CF7.

With the Flamingo add-on, you can let visitors manage their own data they submitted through Contact Form 7. This plugin has 300.000+ installs! Flamingo has a great, intuitive interface to keep track of submitted forms, so you can export them. This, in many cases personal, data must be available to the visitor. You as a website owner has to let users manage this data.

With this add-on, your visitor will be able to manage it without your involvement. Only when the user requests to delete the data, you will have to take action.

If we can help in any way, don’t hesitate to contact us through the same page.

Upcoming add-on: Mailchimp

Mailchimp is probably one of the best-known newsletter and marketing automation tools worldwide. With billions of emails sent each year and their drag&drop interface they’re a great tool for any digital marketeer.

There are many Mailchimp plugins for WordPress available. Some of them are standalone, while others integrate nicely with a form plugin, for example. In both cases, the personal data is stored in Mailchimp. This makes it harder for you (website developer or owner) to handle requests.

The WP-GDPR Mailchimp add-on will give visitors, like all other add-ons, the tools to handle the data themselves. Your visitors can download or update its data without having to leave your website!

Linking the WP-GDPR Mailchimp add-on to Mailchimp is easy. We need an API key to let us collect data from Mailchimp. In one of these 3 ways, we will try to get that access:

Re-use the API key of one of these plugins

Mailchimp for WordPress

Gravity Forms (Mailchimp add-on)

Let you enter an API key through a setting in the backend

If one of the first options (through a plugin) is available, there is no need to enter any setting for this.

Individuals can now also get all add-ons at once with the new Plus plan. Businesses who are not quite big enough for the Pro plan can now get the Freelance plan which allows them to register up to 20 websites.

Upgrade info for existing customers : If you have any questions about upgrading your previous single licenses, you can do so by contacting our live-support or creating a ticket.

General Context

Already in the early 90’s, the European Union adopted the Data Protection Directive which regulated the processing of personal data within the European Union. The directive helped European citizens to be aware of their right to privacy, but the effect on the personal data itself was small. Partially because of the different interpretations of the directive by the individual member states.

With the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), a new and modernised law will become enforceable on the 25th of May 2018. The regulation wants organisations (companies, governments, NGO’s, …) to get a mindset of “Data protection by design”. And this not only for European organisations, but all organisations that handle personal data from a European citizen. Even if the organisation is located outside of the EU.

What is a Data Register?

With the WP-GDPR Core plugin and its add-ons, you have to tools at hand to process personal data and let your visitors manage that data themselves. We’re working on improving the process and explaining more on how the plugin works, so it will be easier for new users to get started with the WP-GDPR plugin. This will also help with changing the mindset of personal data.

Apart from managing personal data, it’s also very important to keep track of what happens to the personal data. Basically a history of all things related to the data. This includes:

When did someone consent to storing the data?

What data can we store and for how long?

Who requested access?

Who filed a delete request?

This “Record of processing activities” (Reference: Article 30 of GDPR) is often called the Data Register and must be available for consultation when privacy authorities ask for it. The Data Register let you keep track on who does what with personal data.

Data Register template

In many cases, creating a Data Register isn’t that hard and can be a good second step (First Step: Identifying all personal data) in getting GDPR compliant. To help you get a grip on the whole Data Register, we make a spreadsheet template available for you to download here:

Automate all the things

As you can see, there’s some administration involved in keeping the Data Register up-to-date. In essence, the Data Register can be this spreadsheet on someone’s computer, but we suggest storing the Data Register on your website. This makes it possible to automate certain parts of storing. For example, we can store the consents from forms or the delete requests automatically in the Data Register of the WP-GDPR plugin.

Of course, since not every request or consent comes from the website, there should be an option to manually add records to the Data Register. In future releases, we will try to make more integrations possible to automatically store the consent. We will start with the WP-GDPR Core and the add-ons.

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